


The Science of Decomposition

by Banonymous Split (VZG)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Gen, Gore, Horror, Prompt Fic, Zombies, halloween fic, pre-season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-07
Updated: 2011-10-07
Packaged: 2017-11-16 10:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VZG/pseuds/Banonymous%20Split
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I am the animated dead. I have a will of my own, and this is the most accurate colloquial term I can apply. There was no voodoo or magic behind this, even if science cannot accurately explain it. I walk, I talk, I think, and yet I decay. I am only nourished by human flesh, and it allows me to live a little longer, to keep my mind stronger than my animal will. You might find it sickening, if I understand your nature."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Science of Decomposition

**Author's Note:**

> This was written before season two aired in response to [this](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/12432.html?thread=64287632#t64287632) prompt on the Sherlock BBC Kink Meme:
> 
> _**Zombie!Sherlock:** Sometime before he meets John, one of sherlock's experiments goes horribly wrong and now he's a zombie. Those body parts? Not (just) for experiments. And he doesn't eat a lot of normal food because it does nothing for him. Nobody knows except Mycroft. But then, somebody finds evidence that he eats the body parts._

He slept naked, with all crevasses and openings into the room shut securely. It was only partly to keep the smell from getting out and giving Mrs. Hudson the wrong idea; he couldn't help that small, niggling fear in the back of his mind that a mouse or some other pest might get in and start eating away at his insides. He'd found flies, once, nestled in on his exposed small intestines, and afterwards the thought would not leave him.

It wasn't that he would feel it, of course. He didn't feel much of anything beyond his fingertips anymore. All the same, he liked having his insides where they were, and his stomach had already given way. He was rotting, too — slowly, but definitely. He measured the rot, and gave himself a few years of walking around time, generously. He wasn't entirely sure what would happen when he no longer had enough muscle and tissues to keep his spine up straight, wasn't even entirely sure how he managed with what he had left, but he hoped to find a way to erase his consciousness before he found out.

His time was limited, and he couldn't afford letting more go to feed a few maggots or mice. He would have slept clothed, but he found that his shirts would slip inwards and stick hard to the sticky-thin remains of his skin. It exposed him more, and besides, rotted flesh was hard to get out of silk.

So he slept naked, and dressed immaculately each morning, making sure his shirts gave the proper appearance of a full abdomen and his slacks covered his exposed femur on his left side without falling in. He adjusted, made sure all his innards were in the right place, and buttoned up tight before he even considered cracking a window.

He owned a dressing gown and soft, relaxed cotton pajamas for nothing more than show. When he thought John was getting suspicious, he'd throw them on, a specially-formed chest-plate secured in under and bandages around his thigh, and pretend to doze on the couch. It almost always push away the nosy air John could get about him when he thought his roommate wasn't being _healthy_.

What did healthy matter for the undead, anyway?

After the pool incident, he found himself donning the dressing gown more and more often, unable to find a suitable enough explanation for his apparent lack of bruising and breaking to satisfy John. It was torturous. Twice, he'd felt his liver, or what remained of it, slip, and he had struggled to find an acceptable excuse to hurry off before it was noticed.

John, with his own pair of broken arms, had taken up residence on the living room couch, and that, too, felt like his own personal form of Hell. When John had spent half his waking hours at work, or searching for work, and at least six hours a night sleeping, he'd had plenty of time to sneak into the kitchen to feast on an "experiment" if the stash in his room had run low. He hadn't had a chance to get to Bart's since they'd returned from the hospital, and Mycroft, who had, admittedly, been considerably helpful in getting him out unchecked, was no use when it came to obtaining reasonably fresh human flesh.

There were times, few and far between, when he'd looked at the webbing between John's fingers, or the flesh of his elbows, and felt his perpetually dry mouth trying desperately to water. When John noticed, he would flush, fidget, and speak suddenly louder. He knew John was under the impression that Sherlock was attracted to him, and sometimes piteously wished he was. For all he'd ignored it in life, in death he desperately missed his libido.

It was a week into John's stay in the living room that Sherlock, with hunger gnawing at him more insistently than decay, forgot himself and tried to eat a hand that he'd left in the freezer while John slept.

Or, he had thought John was sleeping, at least. If he'd fed more recently, if he'd been in his right mind, he would have noticed his breathing was too shallow, his position clearly too uncomfortable to allow for him to sleep, considering the pain he was in.

He'd meant to take it to his room, so that he could at least excuse it as continuing work for a case, but as soon as he removed it from the packaging it was in he lost all semblance of Sherlock Holmes in an instant. It had been a tiny bite, considering — no more than a finger, up to the first knuckle. Cold, unforgivingly hard, not nearly pleasant enough to stop the growling that he felt was in his stomach but knew was in his mind, and damning all the same when he heard the sudden change in breathing behind him.

He didn't turn. Stupidly, he hoped that it was just a result of an intense dream, maybe even a war-related nightmare, and not the exposure he'd been so careful to avoid before.

He'd gotten too relaxed, too cocky around John. He liked him too much. It was his undoing.

"Sherlock?" There was fear, uncertainty, and a level of anger he hadn't known before in that voice. "Care to explain yourself?"

He wracked his mind for any reason a person might practice responsible cannibalism. He almost said it was for a case, something about trying to find a cannibalistic serial killer, but he knew John had suspected something, knew he wouldn't accept that answer even if he didn't know already that Sherlock wasn't quite so maladapted as to think that was reasonable behavior in their society.

He swallowed reflexively, with no saliva to ease the fingertip into his gullet. He considered putting the hand down, half-hysterically considered finishing it as a last meal. He let it drop to his side, heard more than felt the squelching of his insides as his stomach adjusted to the finger, and turned.

"I am undead," he said without preamble, feeling his best chance with John was to tell the truth as quickly as he could. "There was an accident, before I met you — an experiment gone wrong. My former roommate died, and so did I, but I came back. That skull, the one Mrs. Hudson took, was his."

He paused, briefly, remembering how terrible and wonderful it had felt, that first meal, peeling flesh from bone. Exhilarating and satisfying like nothing had ever been before; more inhuman and beyond his control than anything he was prepared to accept, even then. A bittersweet memory, like the taste of a blood-soaked pancreas. Memories to remind him that he wasn't human any longer, and yet had been, once.

"Mycroft has covered for me, at least where my own personal eccentricities couldn't. You noticed my lack of bruising after being buried in rubble — no circulation to bring blood to the skin. My body is no different from any of the corpses you've examined these past few weeks, though my mind is, of course, that of the living, or better than, in most cases.

"I am the animated dead. I have a will of my own, and this is the most accurate colloquial term I can apply. There was no voodoo or magic behind this, even if science cannot accurately explain it. I walk, I talk, I think, and yet I decay. I am only nourished by human flesh, and it allows me to live a little longer, to keep my mind stronger than my animal will. You might find it sickening, if I understand your nature."

He did, too, once, but in that moment of fear and hopelessness he found he could access no more of his humanity. Here was the heartless sociopath others believed in, the only difference being that the blood on his hands that day was already coagulated.

John's face had grown red with rage, the veins in his temples throbbing so strongly Sherlock could nearly hear — and taste — them. His eyes were closed, and still Sherlock could tell a certain amount of that anger was directed inwards. He was ashamed of himself for accepting Sherlock as human, likable, kind beneath it all. In spite of everything, that stung Sherlock the most.

"You couldn't even bother to come up with a decent excuse, could you?" John's voice was low, but loud, like he wasn't sure whether he wanted to whisper or scream. "I don't even see why you'd bother. I was _warned_ , and you're sitting here feeding me absolute _shit_ so absurd even Sally would laugh. What ever happened to being clever?"

Sherlock didn't have an answer for that, except to push off his jacket and begin unbuttoning his shirt, leaving the hand on the kitchen table as he walked forward. He suspected John didn't want one.

"God, I even had nightmares about you. For all that I trusted you, I had nightmares, and even in them you tried harder. Do you even care that I'm going to expose you for what you are? Do you— What are you doing?"

"Offering you substantial evidence," Sherlock said, and when the third button from the bottom slipped through its hole he exposed the top of the gaping wound he had been so careful to hide. While his right hand continued undoing the last of the buttons, the fingers of his left slipped into the gap, pressing at the rubbery remains of organs John most certainly knew the exact names of.

He saw the disbelief, the denial about to come to John's lips, the momentary horror when his shirt was finally opened and he could see for himself all there was of Sherlock's middle. Explanatory theories warred on his face with shocked acceptance of the truth, and to hurry along the battle Sherlock grabbed his wrist, the one attached to his mostly-healed arm, plunging his fingers into his own lukewarm gut. John jerked his hand back, gagging almost immediately. He flailed, pushing his arm past its limits, winced at the pain and pushed himself away from the inexplainable abomination that was his flatmate.

Sherlock followed him, shirt spread wide, keeping his eyes on John's face even as the doctor averted his own, spinning them wildly about in search some hidden explanation or escape. Sherlock probed around into his abdominal cavity, poking at what was left of his muscles.

"Transversus abdominus, you know that one. There should be a rectus abdominus here, see? That should be keeping the front of me up, but it's not there. The explosion — it happened after I inhaled most of the fumes — put debris through me right there. If I was alive it would have been debilitating, if I was lucky enough to get through it without dying anyway. I can't explain how I can even stand, to be honest. John, are you listening?"

He wasn't, Sherlock knew, but this wasn't a game or a horror show. If he didn't impress upon John the severity of the situation, he might go ahead and tell someone anyway; if he didn't convince him of its absolute truth, he might think he was going mad. Mycroft had taken only a little more convincing.

"Should I show you my thigh? It did break, you know, in the explosion. There was an old wound there, though, an accident from a case after I'd already been— made this way. I fixed it up with glue and epoxy at first, so I could walk, but I've made better adjustments since. Do you want to see? I'd think as a doctor it should be very interesting. The muscle isn't attached any more, but it still moves when I—"

"Stop! Stop it, stop!" John had thrown his hands up, as if by blocking Sherlock from his vision he could erase the medical anomaly before him. Sherlock closed his shirt, doing only two buttons up to cover the worst of it, feeling generous towards John's feelings.

"I don't _kill_ ," Sherlock said coldly, still staring him down. "You can decide for yourself if I'm a monster or not, but I've never eaten anybody who wasn't already dead. I nearly starve, but I manage."

John laughed, hollowly, the sound dry. "Starve? You say you're dead, and you're worried about starving?"

"I'm worried about control," Sherlock said, almost indignant. "Do you know how delicious every person I pass on the street looks? Of course you don't. Imagine your favorite food, in supply enough to feed you for a week. I ignore that. I eat the dry, preserved limbs and organs I can get. It's like eating everything cold and underdone. It gets harder every day I don't eat."

John swallowed, then covered his throat, his hand hovering to keep from smearing viscera across his Adam's apple. There, that was true, practical fear. He was starting to accept.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to eat you, you idiot. It's been more than a week now, and all I've got in me is a frozen finger. If I was going to kill you, you'd already be gone."

He sat on the couch, heavily, ignoring the way his organs pushed against each other and threatened to pop out of place. He longed to pick up the hand again and eat what he could, but if he was to convince John that he wasn't going to harm anyone, that would certainly work against him.

People could be so irrational in that way.

It was a long, long set of minutes before John spoke again. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"You're a doctor, it's nothing you haven't seen."

"I've never seen a man _eat a hand_ before."

"I only ate a finger— a knuckle!"

John stared at him, his eyes as wide as they could go, and then began to laugh. It was hysterical, and after a few bellyfuls of sharply-inhaled air he did vomit, but it sounded almost like the way he'd laughed after their first case.

Sherlock, using all the energy he had left in him, smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> And he and John lived on happily, with John using him to study moving muscles and tissue and both of them measuring and fighting decay. They solved crimes and Sherlock didn't eat anybody alive, until Moriarty really pissed him off. THE END.


End file.
